Just as the movie has nothing in common with the Final Fantasy anime, the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within soundtrack has nothing to do with the type of music the anime series use as a soundtrack. I should know – my youngest son is a Final Fantasy fanboy (don’t get him started about the movie, which I enjoyed very much by the way), and I have heard snippets of those Japanese soundtracks before I quickly turn off the CD player.

Yes, I don’t like the acid loud techno-punk sounds of that anime series, represented on this soundtrack by L’Arc-en-Ciel’s frantic, manic ya-ya-ya screeching. The rest of this soundtrack is the soft, soothing sounds of the London Symphony Orchestra led by Elliot Goldenthal.

So it’s all soothing violins, soothing even when the orchestra is drumming up the beat in battle scenes like Zeus Cannon and Flight to the Wasteland. My favorite is the finale music, Adagio and Transfiguration, which shares the base melody with Lara Fabian’s ethereal-sounding vocals in The Dream Within.

Unlike the anime series, whose soundtrack conjures up hipness, acid, and earbleed-headbang kineticity, this soundtrack is more sedate, atmospheric, and ethereal. Think of dolphins swimming in oceans of stars or some new age scene of that sort. And it’s rather nice and romantic.